ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users and other interested parties informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your name and complete internet address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content.

Previous Issues are available.


ALSNews           Vol. 105           June 24, 1998

Table of Contents


    1. CHANGES IN ALS LEADERSHIP ANNOUNCED
    2. USER OFFICE GETS NEW NAME, NEW LOCATION
    3. ALS USERS' MEETING T-SHIRT CONTEST RESUMES
    4. 1997 COMPENDIUM AVAILABLE ON WEB
    5. ALS TEACHER PACKET NOW AVAILABLE ON WEB
    6. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS
    7. OPERATIONS UPDATE

1. CHANGES IN ALS LEADERSHIP ANNOUNCED
(contact: DSChemla@lbl.gov)

At an all-hands meeting on Friday, June 12, Berkeley Lab Director Charles Shank announced that, effective July 1, 1998, he is making organizational changes in the ALS management.

Shank told the ALS staff that, after six years of energetic leadership, Brian Kincaid is resigning from his position as Director of the ALS to pursue full-time scientific research. Kincaid guided the ALS through its final year of construction -- meeting all project milestones on time and on budget -- and its subsequent rapid commissioning. Once the ALS was in operation, Kincaid oversaw the expansion of experimental facilities to the current total of 20 beamline branches, despite the financial constraints of the times. Shank said that the Berkeley Lab owes a great debt of gratitude to Kincaid, whose passionate commitment has always been to make the ALS a world-class facility.

Shank reported that Daniel Chemla, Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Lab Materials Sciences Division, will take on the additional responsibility of being Director of the ALS. Chemla introduced himself by noting that the ALS is already the best performing synchrotron source in its class, and his job is now to bring the scientific program to the same level of excellence.

Chemla is a native of France. After graduate training at the University of Paris, he joined the technical staff of the Centre National d'Etudes des Télécommunications. In 1981, Chemla came to the United States to accept a position at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he initiated research on optoelectronics in semiconductor quantum wells and superlattices. Chemla has been at Berkeley since 1991. His present research interests include many-body interactions and quantum size effects in semiconductor nanostructures and detection and spectroscopy of single molecules and single molecular pairs. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The ALS will retain its status as a Berkeley Lab division. Neville Smith, currently Scientific Program Head of the ALS, will serve as Deputy for the ALS scientific program, and Ben Feinberg, currently Operations Program Head, will assume the role of Deputy for ALS operations. In conjunction with these changes, the Experimental Systems Group, the Scientific Support Group, and the User Services Group, which were formerly under the Scientific Program, will now report directly to Chemla.

Shank expressed his confidence that the new team will provide the leadership necessary for the ALS going into the future. He said that this is a critically important time in the history of the ALS and that everyone at the Laboratory has much to do to assure its continuing vitality, both scientifically and technologically. Shank asked the staff for its active support and creativity in making this new organization a success.

2. USER OFFICE GETS NEW NAME, NEW LOCATION
(contact: alsuser@lbl.gov)

In conjunction with its move to new offices in Building 6, the ALS User Office has changed its name to the ALS User Services Office to better reflect its role in providing assistance to users at the ALS. The staff of the User Services Office -- Ruth Pepe, Sharon Fujimura, and Bernie Dixon -- are prepared to handle all aspects of users' needs, including guest processing, safety training, and badging.

The new User Services Office is now conveniently located on the second floor of the ALS (Building 6) in Room 2203, just above the main lobby. The Office is open 7:30 a.m. - 12 noon and 1:00-4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Users needing assistance outside of office hours should contact the Control Room at ext. 4969.

Contact Information:
ALS User Services Office
Advanced Light Source
Berkeley Lab, MS 6-2100
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510-486-7745
Fax: 510-486-4773

3. ALS USERS' MEETING T-SHIRT CONTEST RESUMES
(contact: ejmoxon@lbl.gov)

After a year's hiatus, the ALS users' T-shirt contest returns this summer by popular demand. ALS users, staff, family, and friends are invited to release their creative energy by entering the third annual ALS T-Shirt Design Contest, sponsored by the ALS Users' Executive Committee. The winner will have his or her signed artwork featured on T-shirts for participants at this year's ALS Users' Association Meeting (October 23-24).

T-shirt designs should be no larger than 8.5 in by 11 in (22 cm by 28 cm) and should not use more than four colors. Rough drawings or concepts, as well as more polished artwork, are all acceptable. The words "Advanced Light Source" or "ALS" must appear somewhere in the design.

Send designs by JULY 24 to:
Elizabeth Moxon
Advanced Light Source
Berkeley Lab, MS 4-230
Berkeley, CA 94720
or fax to 510-495-2111. Enter now, enter often.

4. 1997 COMPENDIUM AVAILABLE ON WEB
(contact: djdixon@lbl.gov)

The ALS Compendium of User Abstracts and Technical Reports for 1997 is now available on the Web. The Compendium includes extended abstracts from ALS users on research they performed at the ALS in 1997, as well as technical reports by ALS staff on research and development, achievements, and future plans in operations, experimental systems, and accelerator physics.

Electronic publication of the Compendium brings several new ways to use this document. Readers can search the full text of all user abstracts; search by title, author, beamline, or other attributes; or browse abstracts by subject, beamline, or author. The printed version of the Compendium goes to press soon and should be available by early August; the Web-based Compendium's main page offers a link through which you can reserve a copy.

5. ALS TEACHER PACKET NOW AVAILABLE ON WEB
(contact: ejmoxon@lbl.gov)

Teachers and students now have quick access to ALS-related curriculum materials and fact sheets on our award-winning educational web site, Microworlds.

The curriculum materials, designed for grades 4-12 (ages 9-18), were developed by local teachers, science educators, and ALS staff for a teachers' workshop held at the ALS in 1996. The curriculum materials include hands-on activities on electricity, magnets, and polarized light. The fact sheets cover intriguing topics from the top ten questions people ask about the ALS to how mass, energy, and the speed of light are related. All of these materials are available for downloading as Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

In addition, two classroom-sized posters that complement the curriculum materials, one about how the ALS works and the other showing the electromagnetic spectrum, are available by mail free of charge. For the curriculum materials, fact sheets, and instructions on how to request one or both of the posters, go to the ALS Teacher Packet page.

6. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS

To highlight the richness of our user community and help introduce recent arrivals, we offer this listing of some of the experimenters who will be collecting data during the next two weeks at the ALS.

Beamline 1.4.3: Felicia Hendrickson and Robert Glaeser (U. California, Berkeley) will measure the Fourier transform infrared spectra of bacteriorhodopsin microcrystals.

Beamline 1.4.1: Joel Ager, Wei Shan, and Eugene Haller (Berkeley Lab) will be commissioning the ultraviolet photoluminescence endstation.

Beamline 8.0.1: Jeff Kortright (Berkeley Lab) and Jo Stohr (IBM Almaden) will make measurements of the x-ray magneto-optical Kerr effect (XMOKE).

Beamline 9.3.1: A group led by Dennis Lindle (U. Nevada, Las Vegas) will take gas-phase ion time-of-flight measurements.

Beamline 9.3.2: Chuck Fadley's group (Berkeley Lab) will perform inter-atom resonant photoemission experiments.

Beamline 10.3.2: Ed Franco (Aracor Co.) will do capillary x-ray concentrator testing.

7. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(contact: rmmiller@lbl.gov)

Beam reliability for the last two weeks was 96.4% overall and 97% for user shifts. All outages were of short duration. The feedback system has been restored to full operation: the Accelerator Physics, rf, and Electrical Engineering groups performed rf system tuning and feedback system timing adjustments on the morning of June 9.

Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web. Weekly operations scheduling meetings are held on Fridays at 3:30 p.m. in the Building 6 conference room. The Accelerator Status Hotline at (510) 486-6766 (ext. 6766 from Lab phones) features a recorded message giving up-to-date information on the operational status of the accelerator.